brian@sdcsvax.UUCP (Brian Kantor) (03/28/86)
As one of the authors of the NNTP protocol (RFC977), I can speak with some authority on this point: the survey process WILL NOT INCLUDE users of the network news reading programs, if it is run on the system where they read news. The reason is that there is NO /usr/lib/news/active file on that system - in fact, there doesn't have to be a /usr/lib/news directory at all. True, the users each have .newsrc files that do tally their subscription activity, but the current news survey also requires access to the 'active file, so it will not give valid results, if, indeed, it will run at all. Worse, many of the systems that converted over to use NNTP and rrn may have left their old /usr/lib/news directories in place, with an old and completely out-of-date active files. I've not seen what actually happens in this case. Now that I've said all that, realize that the number of hosts running nntp and rrn is really small. I doubt that it would have much of any effect on the statistics gathered from any significant number of hosts using the conventional news system. Brian Kantor UCSD Office of Academic Computing Academic Network Operations Group UCSD B-028, La Jolla, CA 92093 (619) 452-6865 decvax\ brian@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu ihnp4 >--- sdcsvax --- brian ucbvax/ Kantor@Nosc
reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (03/30/86)
In article <1614@sdcsvax.UUCP> brian@sdcsvax.UUCP (Brian Kantor) writes: >As one of the authors of the NNTP protocol (RFC977), I can speak with >some authority on this point: the survey process WILL NOT INCLUDE users >of the network news reading programs, if it is run on the system where >they read news. The most recent version of arbitron, which I posted to net.sources a few days ago, handles this case properly. I'd like to suggest that the ability to measure readership is an important enough property of a news sytem that perhaps future revisions of NNTP ought to include some scheme for copying /usr/lib/news/active (or its equivalent) to the local machine. Brian -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA